“Yeah, let’s go ahead and add in another stitch so we can make sure this is nice and tight,” Sarah Harkins’ family doctor said to her husband moments after she’d given birth to her daughter in 2005.
“I was so out of it physically, emotionally, and mentally. The doctor said it to him. Not to me… I was just lying there like a lump,” remembers Harkins, a New Orleans-based doula and lactation counselor.
Following a traumatic induction of labor, an epidural placed too late for relief, and a forceful extraction of her baby, Harkins was horrified to realize that the family doctor she’d carefully chosen to attend her birth was giving her a “husband stitch.”
A husband stitch, or daddy stitch, is an extra stitch given during the repair process after a vaginal birth, supposedly to tighten the vagina for increased pleasure of a male sexual partner.
The idea of the husband stitch has gained some recent attention following the publication of Carmen Maria Machado’s story “The Husband Stitch” and the responses to it.
Is it a myth? A hurtful joke? An urban legend? A combination of hearsay, misunderstanding, and chauvinist attitudes? To some, the very idea of a husband stitch is a silly notion, not at all based in the reality of care.
But the practice is very real.
There are no scientific studies that show how many women have been affected, nor is there a clear method for evaluating how prevalent the husband stitch truly is in obstetrics. But women share their stories as anecdotes, whispered as warning.
The proof is in women’s words. Or sometimes, it’s sewn into their bodies.